With Verizon launching smartphone app store, what about BREW?

Verizon Wireless entered the increasingly crowded app store segment Tuesday, announcing it will launch its VCast Apps storefront in the fourth quarter of 2009. The operator confirmed its app store plans as it kicked off its first-ever Verizon Developer Community event in San Jose--while the new storefront will target smartphones, which now represent roughly 40 percent of all devices on the Verizon Wireless network, millions of subscribers remain feature phone users, and a significant chunk of Verizon's developer partners continue to focus on those customers via Qualcomm's BREW platform. BREW's continued relevance in the evolving Verizon ecosystem was a major question heading into the conference, and Verizon Wireless and Qualcomm answered by renewing their BREW partnership, promising a series of changes and improvements designed to enhance the feature phone consumer experience.

"Verizon's objective is to enable choices for our subscribers," said the carrier's director of technology for product development and integration Stan Reinhold during a deep-dive session at the VDC event. "We've had seven years of success with BREW, we've got a lot going on now and we've got a lot more to come." Chief among those plans: Open Catalog, a Verizon Wireless initiative created to simplify BREW certification and on-boarding processes. Verizon will now support free BREW apps to encourage discovery and introduce a new recommendation powered by Qualcomm subsidiary Xiam Technologies to suggest applications according to a subscriber's behavioral and contextual profile. Verizon Wireless also will support micro-transactions within BREW apps--enabling users to purchase weapons with a mobile game, for example--and offer developers greater flexibility to establish their own application prices and payment mechanisms (e.g., subscription, a la carte, demo or use-based). 

Although Verizon Wireless and Qualcomm are still ironing out many key details of Open Catalog in advance of the effort's 2010 rollout, Qualcomm's vice president of ecosystem development Mitch Oliver said the ultimate goal is to lower the barriers to getting BREW applications to market, giving developers greater control over how their apps are distributed and advertised. To that end, Verizon and Qualcomm will promote app discovery via search, web and shortcode promotions, promising new opportunities to market applications to the subscribers most likely to download them, regardless of their mass appeal. "We're still in the incubation stage, but a lot of long-tail content is going to become available," Oliver said. By next year, subscribers also will be able to purchase BREW downloads without exiting the WAP environment, which should significantly increase sales conversion rates.

And even with Verizon Wireless vowing to launch its 4G network by this time next year, Reinhold maintains there is still room for BREW in a future dominated by LTE. "BREW is an important part of Verizon's overall strategy," he said. "BREW has legs." -Jason